The Department of Sociology at Renmin University of China (RUC) was established in April 1987. After years of development, it has gradually become one of the top sociology departments in China, with excellence in teaching and research ranging complete areas of the discipline. With its strong faculty members and professional training system, RUC Sociology has made significant impacts on talent cultivation, research development, social services, and cultural inheritance and innovation in and beyond the country.

Looking back, Renmin University of China has had a long tradition of sociology for over 70 years. In the early 1950s, when RUC was newly founded, many famous sociologists, such as Da Chen, Jinghan Li, Jingchao Wu, Chengxin Zhao, Shiguang Dai, Wenxian Chen, Weitian Quan, etc., came to work here. They laid an important foundation for the recovery and development of sociology at Renmin University of China in the early 1980s.

The Department of Sociology at RUC has the authority to award doctoral degrees in the primary discipline of sociology and to award bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in subfields within the discipline. With the approval of the Department of Degree Management of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, the department established a center for post-doctoral study in 1998; a master's program in anthropology in the same year, a doctoral program in anthropology in 2001, and a master's program in folklore in 2002.

RUC Sociology is committed to building an open research community based on scholarly journals and social survey databases. Two well-established peer-reviewed journals, Sociological Review and Social Construction, are based in RUC Sociology. It has also launched a number of large-scale and longitudinal survey projects, including the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) and the Chinese Education Panel Survey (CEPS), contributing to a large-scale and comprehensive platform for continued endeavors of nationwide data collection.